“Eating is a natural, healthy, and pleasurable activity for satisfying hunger. However, in our food-abundant, diet-obsessed culture, eating is often mindless, consuming, and guilt-inducing instead. Mindful eating is an ancient mindfulness practice with profound modern implications and applications for resolving this troubled love-hate relationship with food.” – Am I Hungry
Obesity has become an epidemic in the industrialized world. In the U.S. the incidence of obesity, defined as a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above has more than doubled over the last 35 years. Currently more than 2 in 3 adults are considered to be overweight or obese and around 35% of the population meets the criteria for obesity. Although the incidence rates have appeared to stabilize, the fact that over a third of the population is considered obese is very troubling. Particularly troubling is that about one-third of children and adolescents are considered to be overweight or obese and half of those are obese. This is having a major impact on the health of the population. Obesity has been found to shorten life expectancy by eight years and extreme obesity by 14 years. This is because obesity is associated with cardiovascular problems such as coronary heart disease and hypertension, stroke, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and others. Obviously there is a need for effective treatments to prevent or treat obesity. But, despite copious research, drug development, and a myriad of dietary and exercise programs, there still is no safe and effective treatment.
Overweight and obesity result from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. One tactic to address the problem is to reduce intake. Countless dietary programs to do just that have been proposed and tested, but the epidemic appears to be getting worse rather than better. One of the problems with intake in the modern world is much eating occurs mindlessly while the individual is otherwise occupied, perhaps with TV, reading, conversation, driving, work, etc. It has been shown that when distractions are present, the individual tends to eat more, and eat beyond the level where the individual feels full. So, recently attempts have been made to increase awareness of eating and decrease distractions.
Mindful eating involves paying attention to eating while it is occurring, including attention to the sight, smell, flavors, and textures of food, to the process of chewing and swallowing, and to the physiological feelings of hunger and fullness from the body. It is hoped that mindful eating may help reduce intake. Indeed, high levels of mindfulness are associated with lower levels of obesity (See http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/eating/) and mindfulness training has been shown to reduce binge eating, emotional eating, and external eating (See http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/26/eat-mindfully-for-obesity/). These results are encouraging, so, there is a need to explore in detail how mindfulness has its effects on intake.
In today’s Research News article “Attention with a mindful attitude attenuates subjective appetitive reactions and food intake following food-cue exposure”
Fisher and colleagues studied the effects of mindfulness on reactions to food cues and intake. They randomly assigned university students and staff to a mindfulness induction or a control condition. Participants received either a brief instruction in mindfulness followed by a brief breath awareness meditation or listened to a neutral story. They were then exposed to the sight of a number of attractive foods. This resulted in heightened hunger in the control participants but not the mindfulness participants. Afterwards the participants either practiced meditation or reflected on their experience for 10 minutes. Subsequently they were left for 5-minutes with a plate of cookies present that they were told was a reward for participation. The mindfulness group ate significantly fewer cookies than the control group.
These results are interesting and suggest that mindfulness training, even when brief, can reduce reactions to food cues and reduce intake. Although this was an artificial laboratory condition, the findings suggest that mindfulness can reduce mindless eating by reducing reactions to the presence of attractive foods. This, of course, does not show that mindfulness will reduce intake in the real world. But, it does demonstrate one of the ways that mindfulness might work to help control real world intake.
So, don’t give in to food temptation with mindfulness.
“Food reveals our connection with the earth. Each bite contains the life of the sun and the earth…. We can see and taste the whole universe in a piece of bread! Contemplating our food for a few seconds before eating, and eating in mindfulness, can bring us much happiness.” – Thich Nhat Hahn
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies